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Friday, April 12, 2019

When 6 is Nine: A Dark Day for Us All

Julian Assange, Political Prisoner: A Dark Day for Citizenship

After a day of following RT’s live coverage of the outrageous arrest of Julian Assange, abducted from the Embassy of Ecuador in London by British police agents, and then hearing US media fall over each other in a competition for who could make the most psychotic accusations against Assange (Fox News, interestingly, distinguishing itself as the sane exception on this matter), I have come to a different set of opinions on what this event means. It has been many years since I last wrote like I do below, but I have an axe to grind, and boy do I mean to grind it.

A Dark Day for What?

My first surprise was not in the arrest itself and the abrupt cancellation of Ecuador’s asylum, but the conclusion that first came to many commentators’ minds: this is a dark day for journalism. If that were true, we might even breathe a sigh of relief, given how disreputable and discredited most of the news media have become as publishers of falsehoods, propaganda, and smears.

The sadder reality is that today was a dark day for citizenship, for democracy, and for international law.

The event should serve as a reminder that we are all being violently confronted with a dead post-liberalism that is reactionary, abusive, and arrogant. In the West at least, all of us live in authoritarian prisons: mass surveillance, mass indoctrination, and increasingly all-inclusive censorship.

Journalism would have needed to still be alive, for this to have been a dark day for it.

The Crime?

Julian Assange has been accused of many crimes over the years, and now his state-level detractors will finally have the unenviable task of actually trying to prove their accusations in court. Assange’s most notorious “crime” is to have better informed us of the reality of global corruption and imperial warfare.

Whether the broad public was deserving of his sacrifice is another matter, as is the question about the degree to which the public made use of the knowledge produced by WikiLeaks.

For my part, I benefited: thanks to WikiLeaks, I was able to mine the Afghan War Logs for information about the Human Terrain System, finding new information that had not been known to that point, and which revised some of the key arguments I had been making.

WikiLeaks’ publication of the US Embassy Cables, which I have still been using even in some of my most recent articles, has been a unique treasure trove that could be the source of countless books.

In more recent years, I explored WikiLeaks’ publications of the emails of John Podesta, and then tried to summarize the key findings (of which there were many). We are told that this publication significantly harmed Hillary Clinton’s chances of being elected in 2016—to which I can only say: I hope that is true.

Academics have, for the most part, really missed the mark to the extent that they have failed to show sufficient curiosity and diligence in making use of WikiLeaks’ freely available material—it truly stands as an indictment of the failure of their imagination, and the poverty of their methods.

I have had my own criticisms of WikiLeaks over the years, but never about its core mission and its methods, and never about the need for WikiLeaks. Yet even on this point, some academics were quick to embrace OpenLeaks as a “better alternative” to WikiLeaks—now try to find OpenLeaks. One would think that, at a minimum, a site has to at least exist for it to be an alternative.

As for specific crimes for which Assange has been charged, they do not include “working for Russia,” which he has never done—if he had, he might have enjoyed Russian protection. Russia does not leave its operatives hanging out there to be easily plucked by adversaries. Nonetheless, the hyperventilating Russiagate conspiracy theory crowd in the US, still reeling from the devastating defeat handed to them by the Mueller non-event, is looking for anything to restore just a shred of credibility.

Assange also is not guilty of “stealing secrets” from the US military—only one person did that, has already been convicted, and has already served time: Chelsea Manning.

Assange’s hands, real or virtual, were never on any US government documents prior to their transfer—“theft” is thus totally false. WikiLeaks’ publications have not resulted in the deaths of any US forces in the field—nor is WikiLeaks responsible for their being “in danger”.

Those responsible for putting the lives of US troops in danger are the politicians who deploy them in countless futile, reckless, and unnecessary wars.

As is to be expected, Julian Assange has also been the target of lurid, phony rape accusations, yet another ignominious episode in a long line of high-profile fabricated sex slurs. Assange was never charged with rape, nor did he evade questioning by Swedish authorities.

What Assange has said repeatedly, on countless occasions for several years, is that any effort to arrest him would be used by the US to seek his extradition. Unfortunately, Assange’s claim has now received 100% validation, while his critics who dismissed his claim as unwarranted hyperbole, have just had any remainder of their credibility completely destroyed. This takes us to the nature of Assange’s opposition.

The Gift of a Bad Opposition?

With the passage of years, it’s a challenge to remember the names of Julian Assange’s critics who came from the ranks of the many forgettable drones housed in foreign policy meat-lockers that are misleadingly called “think” tanks. They tried, and failed (often gloriously) to make the case that Assange was a “spy,” that he had “endangered lives,” that he in fact published nothing of any significance (so why arrest him?), and when that did not work, yes, of course, he was a “fugitive rapist”.

Even some ostensibly left-wing conspiracy theorists would accuse Assange of being anti-Iran, pro-invasion of Iraq, a Mossad agent, and a CIA agent. What WikiLeaks could not publish, because it did not receive the leaks, was taken to be a deliberate act of omission (but clearly the nuts bought into the state-authored propaganda about WikiLeaks acting as hackers).

US anthropologists were no exception—if and when they could ever be distracted from talking about themselves, what they had to say about WikiLeaks was painfully little, and usually of the most insipid, vapid, and trivial order. This includes all of the so-called “cyber anthropologists” and “digital anthropologists,” who do not even really know what they are studying (they think they’re studying “the Internet”).

To spend time with Assange’s opponents—and I have—is to experience intellectual squalor on a whole other level. Let’s move on then.

Nobody is Above the Law?

Into what a trashy pit of decrepitude have the elite classes in the UK fallen. There was Theresa May today—still pretending to act as if she might be “Prime Minister” for five minutes longer—blowing the line “no one is above the law”. Yes, but these days it seems that it’s only ever those who are above the law that say that nobody is above the law.

In stating that “nobody is above the law,” the defunct, discredited, and soon to be banished Theresa May resorted to precisely the line that is used by actual dictators when cracking down on opponents. Opponents are always “criminals”. But May also needs to distract the UK public, and Assange might offer a few moments of distraction. Assange’s arrest, she will gloat, was her Hillary-Gaddafi moment.

The UK, however, is engaged in prosecuting an asylum-seeker. The UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention stated in 2016 that it considered the various forms of deprivation of liberty to which Julian Assange had been subjected, constituted a form of arbitrary detention, and that he should be released and compensated.

Yet the first UK judge to confront Assange today (April 11, 2019), did not concern himself so much with the UN or international law, as with Assange’s personality. Julian Assange is apparently guilty of a personality crime.

The judge—presumably a leading psychoanalyst—went down into the bowels of Twitter trolling by unnecessarily slandering Assange as “narcissistic”. Is that the crime? Is it even relevant?

This already shows “the justice system” failing, beginning with its very first actual test—it reveals a degree of personal acrimony that renders fair and impartial justice ridiculous.

If dignity has fled the state in the UK, one place to which it did not relocate was the state in Ecuador.

¡Long Live Bananas!

All thanks are due to His Majesty, The Ironically Named Lenin Moreno, for successfully ushering Ecuador into a new era as a resurrected Banana Republic. The political leadership of Ecuador manifests that unique combination of servility and greed which we usually find in America’s “force multipliers”.

Lenin Moreno, this new friend of the US, who expelled Assange a mere month after meeting Mike Pence in all his constipated Christian glory, is also someone who has openly backed the coup in Venezuela, whose figurehead is the opposition activist brat known as Juán Guaidó.

Moreno operates as we have come to expect of corrupt goons, taking revenge on Assange for WikiLeaks exposing his corruption. In the process, Moreno treated his Embassy, its staff, and international law, as if they were his personal tools, put there to advance his campaign of self-aggrandizement.

In a plain lie, published dutifully and without question by mainstream media, Moreno’s government totally denied that there was a decision to expel Assange, when Assange already knew that the decision had been taken. Clearly Moreno wanted to prevent a massive crowd from forming in advance of Assange’s arrest, and he seems to have succeeded. Too few believed the reports of Ecuador’s growing hostility toward Assange, a man to whom that government had granted asylum and even citizenship (apparently not worth much in Ecuador).

If this much squalor was not enough, then you have yet to meet the King of Squalor.

Me? I Never Knew Anybody!

The press has known since at least April of 2017 that the US had filed arrest charges for Julian Assange. Donald Trump has had ample time to prepare a response that did not sound quite so bumbling, another example of his trademark mendacity.

Donald Trump today acted as if he had never even heard of WikiLeaks. Not even his loyal fans at Fox News could support that illusion though, as they broadcast numerous clips of Trump loudly praising WikiLeaks, which he loved so very much during the 2016 election campaign. Julian Assange received respectful treatment on Fox News, with Sean Hannity traveling to interview Assange in person.

Trump’s more deranged and dishonest opponents at home might alternatively claim that his government is arresting Assange in order to silence Assange. Yes. That’s it! It’s all a cover-up of the real extent of “Russia collusion”! That is why the DoJ is charging Assange for something unrelated to Russia. Get it?

All joking aside, what we see in North America is a crackdown on whistleblowers acting in the public interest, and a crackdown on journalism, and that is just the beginning. We have also seen (and some of us have experienced) censorship in “social media,” along with increased corporate surveillance and rigging of Internet search results, added to actual banning and censorship. The list of cases is now longer than when it was summarized here in December, and here (search for the word “censor” to see the references on those pages).

Freedom of speech is the actual “threat” here—in other words, a basic right of citizenship. It’s not impoverished Central Americans on the US–Mexico border that threaten the citizenship rights of Americans, as much as Americans’ very own government. How will the US preach “in the name of democracy” to, say, Venezuela, while conducting a crackdown on journalism at home, stifling free speech, and persecuting whistleblowers?

With a bona fide political prisoner soon occupying front-page headlines, I cannot wait for the US to resume lecturing other countries about their democracy.

A Strange Relief

What a strange relief it must be for Julian Assange, even if he is not conscious of it at this very moment—to no longer have to endure that impossible stasis of being locked in a closet in Ecuador’s embassy, without so much as the benefit of a short walk in the sun and fresh air.

His time there rendered him ill, and he looked both sick and dramatically aged today.

Clearly the time had come for a proper resolution, one way or another. For years, every day, Assange has been training his mind for this very confrontation with the US. Every argument, every idea, every detail has been rehearsed endlessly, reworked, elaborated, strengthened. Now Assange will be able to force the US authorities to finally justify themselves.

This is the US on trial too, and it has more to lose from this confrontation than Assange. Great defense lawyers and ample defense funds will be provided to Assange, especially by his wealthier supporters (celebrities among them). This extradition and the upcoming trial of Assange might turn out to be a very significant mistake on the part of the US. And all for what? Maybe a maximum of five years in prison?

Assange will end his days as a free man, continuing his work, wealthy, and celebrated. The US has no such future prospects.